Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [23]

The Wikimedia Developer Summit is the annual meeting to push the evolution of MediaWiki and other technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement. The next edition will be held in San Francisco on January 9–11, 2017.

We welcome all Wikimedia technical contributors, third party developers, and users of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia APIs. We specifically want to increase the participation of volunteer developers and other contributors dealing with extensions, apps, tools, bots, gadgets, and templates.

Important deadlines:

Monday, October 24: last day to request travel sponsorship. Applying takes less than five minutes.

Monday, October 31: last day to propose an activity. Bring the topics you care about!

The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 8th. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 9th. It will be on all wikis from November 10th (calendar).

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Ndryshimet e ardhëshme

RevisionSlider will be enabled by default on all beta wikis, on testwiki, testwiki2, mediawikiwiki and de.wikipedia.org. [41][42][43]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [44]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).

In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [45]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [47]

You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [48]

A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [49]

Changes this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [50][51][52]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [53]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [55]

When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [56]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).

Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [57][58]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [60]

ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [61]

Changes this week

You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [62]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [63]

You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [64]

Because of work on cross-wiki watchlistsglobal renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [66]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.

The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [67]

Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [68]

Problems

Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [69]

Changes this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.

The live option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated. [73]

Problems

Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [74]

The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to. [81]

Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in. [82]

When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [83]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

The Wikimedia technical community seeks input from developers for
developers, to create a high-profile list of desired improvements. The scope of the survey includes the MediaWiki platform (core software, APIs, developer environment, enablers for extensions, gadgets, templates, bots, dumps), the Wikimedia server infrastructure, the contribution process, and documentation.

The best part: we want to have the results published by Wednesday, February 15. Yes, in a month, to have a higher chance to influence the
Wikimedia Foundation annual plan FY 2017-18.

There's no time to lose. Propose your ideas before the end of January,
either by pushing existing tasks in Phabricator or by creating new ones. You can find instructions on the wiki page. Questions and feedback are welcome especially on the related Talk page.

The voting phase is expected to start on February 6 (tentative). Watch this space (or even better, the wiki page) - SSethi_(WMF) January 21st, 2017 3:07 AM (UTC)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [84]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).

ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [86]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).

Future changes

The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [87][88]

We collected around 77 proposals that were marked as suitable for the developer wishlist and met the defined scope and criteria. These proposals fall into the following nine categories: Frontend, Backend, Code Contribution (Process, Guidelines), Extensions, Technical Debt, Developer Environment, Documentation, Tools (Phabricator, Gerrit) and Community Engagement.

What happens next?
Proposals that will gather most votes will be included in the final results which will be published on Wednesday, February 15th. These proposals will also be considered in the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan FY 2017-18 - SSethi_(WMF) (talk) 04:41, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [89]

Changes this week

Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after. [90]

There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change. [91]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems. [92][93]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. [94]

Problems

The Firefox add-onFirefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg. [95]

Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this. [96]

Changes this week

The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later. [97]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring. [98]

There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options: type and peers. The type option solves this problem. You can use peers to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers. [101]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [103]

Changes this week

You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor. [104]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later. [105]

The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia. [106][107]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't. [108]

When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view. [109]

Problems

Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [110]

Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately. [111]

Changes this week

The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view. [112]

The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log. [113]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. [114][115]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [116]

CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [117][118]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [119]

You can see monthly page views when you click on Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API. [121]

The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later. [122]

The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers. [123]

Problems

On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it. [124]

Changes this week

When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs. [125]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 mars at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes. [126]

Problems

Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed. [127][128]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The Kryej ndryshimet button now says Publiko faqen or Publiko ndryshimet on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publiko faqen is when you save a new page and Publiko ndryshimet when you edit an existing page. [129]

The tracking category Kategoria:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [130]

English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [131]

Problems

Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [132]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [137]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.

RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [138]

The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [140]

Problems

Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 prill at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [141]

Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [148]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.

Changes this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [152]

The Publiko ndryshimet, Parapamje and Trego ndryshimet buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [153]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Fshih kategorizimin e faqeve in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Zgjero listën mbikëqyrëse të tregojë të tëra ndryshimet përkatëse in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [154]

There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [155]

Changes this week

When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [156]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [157][158]

Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: {{1x| sad :-{ face }}. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [159][160]

The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using('mediawiki.util').done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [163]

Changes this week

The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [164]

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages. [165][166]

The Wikidata development team is about to deploy a new feature on all Wikipedias. It is a new type of notification (via Echo, the notification system you see at the top right of your wiki when you are logged in), that will inform the creator of a page, when this page is connected to a Wikidata item.

You may know that Wikidata provides a centralized system for all the interwikilinks. When a new page is created, it should be connected to the corresponding Wikidata item, by modifying this Wikidata item. With this new notification, editors creating pages will be informed when another editor connects this page to Wikidata.

This feature will be deployed on May 30th on all the Wikipedias, excepting English, French and German. This feature will be disable by default for existing editors, and enabled by default for new editors.

This is the first step of the deployments, the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects will follow in the next months.

If you have any question, suggestion, please let me know by pinging me. You can also follow and leave a comment on the Phabricator ticket.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).

There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [171]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [172]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [174]

When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [175]

You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [176]

New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [177]

Problems

The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [178]

Changes this week

Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [179]

You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [180]

When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [181]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).

String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [182]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [183][184]

Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [185]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [186]

When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [187]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [188]

Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [189]

Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [190][191]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [192]

Changes this week

irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [193]

Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [194]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [195]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).

Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [196]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [197]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [198]

Changes this week

Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.

There is no new Mediawiki version this week.

EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [199]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article. [200]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 korrik. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 korrik. It will be on all wikis from 13 korrik (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 korrik at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis. [201]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

"Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [202]

Problems

On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [203]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [205]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [206][207][208]

.mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [209]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 korrik. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 korrik. It will be on all wikis from 27 korrik (calendar).

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 korrik at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the Wikimedia Foundation July 2017 Metrics & Activities Meeting. The meeting is about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are perceived and understood by the world. The meeting will be on 27 korrik at 19:00 (UTC). See the agenda and how to join.

Future changes

New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.

Right now, the feature is behind a feature flag - to use it on your wiki, please go to the Special:Undelete page, and add &fuzzy=1 to the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=1. Then search for the pages you're interested in. There should be more results than before, due to using ElasticSearch indexing (via the CirrusSearch extension).

We plan to enable this improved search by default on all wikis soon (around August 1, 2017). If you have any objections to this - please raise them with the Discovery team via email or on this announcement's discussion page. Like most Mediawiki configuration parameters, the functionality can be configured per wiki.
Once the improved search becomes the default, you can still access the old mode using &fuzzy=0 in the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=0

Please note that since Special:Undelete is an admin-only feature, this search capability is also only accessible to wiki admins.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [211]

Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [213]

You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Më njofto me email edhe kur ka redaktime të vogla të faqeve dhe skedave" at the bottom of "Përdoruesi" in your preferences if you want to. [216]

The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [217]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).

Future changes

Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [218]

Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [219][220]

Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [221][222]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [223]

Problems

The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [224][225]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).

Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [228]

If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [229]

The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [230]

The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [231]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [234]

Problems

Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [235]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [237]

The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [239][240]

Problems

Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Zgjero listën mbikëqyrëse të tregojë të tëra ndryshimet përkatëse" in your preferences and see if it helps. [241]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [244]

The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [245]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

Sorry to use English. Please help translate to your language! Thank you.

In short: starting on 26 September, New Filters for Edit Review (now in Beta) will become standard on Recent Changes. They provide an array of new tools and an improved interface. If you prefer the current page you will be able to opt out. Learn more about the New Filters.

Starting on 26 September, New Filters for Edit Review will become standard on Recent Changes. We have decided to do this release because of a long and successful Beta test phase, positive feedback from various users and positive user testing.

If your community has specific concerns about this deployment or internal discussion, it can request to have the deployment to their wikis delayed to October 1, if they have sensible, consistent with the project, actionable, realistic feedback to oppose (at the development team's appreciation).

You will also be able to opt-out this change in your preferences.

Concerning Watchlists

Starting on September 19, the Beta feature will have a new option. Watchlists will have all filters available now on the Beta Recent Changes improvements.

If you have already activated the Beta feature "New filters for edit review", you have no action to take. If you haven't activated the Beta feature "New filters for edit review" and you want to try the filters on Watchlists, please go to your Beta preferences on September 19.

How to be ready

Please share this announcement!

Do you use Gadgets that change things on your RecentChanges or Watchlist pages, or have you customized them with scripts or CSS? You may have to make some changes to your configuration. Despite the fact that we have tried to take most cases into consideration, some configurations may break. The Beta phase is a great opportunity to have a look at local scripts and gadgets: some of them may be replaced by native features from the Beta feature.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now see contributions from an IP range at Special:Contributions. Before you could only see contributions from single IP addresses. Some older contributions from IP ranges could be missing at first because it will take some time to add them. [249][250]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 September at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Wikitext syntax highlighting is a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. You can now search through the entire article with CTRL+F or cmd+F when you edit. Before it just searched through a part of the article. The developers are also fixing a couple of other bugs. [252][253]

You now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [255]

Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [256]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (calendar).

You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [260]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [261]

The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [264]

Changes later this week

The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [265]

If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

When you edit a template with the visual editor it follows the template's format configuration on how to save it. You can now change the format in more powerful ways if your wiki wants it. [266][267]

The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It has been a beta feature for the last five months. You can now try out the new interface on a page where you will actually get simulated edit conflicts. You can give feedback to the developers.

Problems

There is a problem with recent changes pages and your watchlist that show a large number of pages. Until it is fixed, Wikidata edits will not be shown on recent changes or in your watchlist on Commons or Russian Wikipedia. If necessary, Wikidata edits will be removed from all wikis. [268]

Notifications are not working for some actions. For example some users don't get a notification when they are mentioned. The developers are working on fixing this. [269]

Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [270]

Changes later this week

Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia from 17 October. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [271]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can use ccnorm_contains_any when you create an abuse filter. This can be used to look for multiple words or phrases within a string. It will find words where some characters have been replaced. You can read more in the documentation. [272]

Changes later this week

When you search in some languages the search function could use specific other languages if the first language didn't work. This is called a fallback language. This didn't work properly and created bad searches. The search index is being fixed to work better. [273]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now block users from emailing you through the Wikimedia wikis. [275]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [280]

Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [281]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [283]

The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [284][285][286]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [287][288]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now test the new advanced search function beta feature on mediawiki.org. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It will come to German and Arabic Wikipedia this week. It will come to more wikis later. [289]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).

Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems. [295]

Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [296][297]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

The Community Liaisons team at the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for active tech ambassadors. This is to make sure the Wikimedia communities get all the information they need about new features and can be involved in the technical development. [298]

A new tag marks edits where a redirect was created or removed. This still works when the editor writes something else in the edit summary. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. [300]

If you use Chrome on Android, you can now use the print to PDF button to create a PDF of an article. [301]

Filter by number of edits or filter by time range have been grouped on a same menu on the recent changes page if you use the new filters. The "Shih ndryshimet e fundit" link is now more prominent. [302]

Some of the web fonts that were provided by the Universal Language Selector extension are being removed. This is to reduce the load time on pages. The web fonts were added many years ago to help users read text in scripts which did not have fonts or had broken fonts. This is not the case any more. You can check the status page for a list of all web fonts and whether they are currently being used and especially for special requirements. [303]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2018.

Problems

When you import a page from another wiki the usernames of the users who edited the article on the wiki you imported it from are shown in the article history. This should link to the users on the original wiki. A script to fix this caused problems for Wikidata and German Wikipedia. It also created a large number of SUL accounts on wikis where editors had never edited. [304]

Some bot owners got email about their bots logging in from a new computer. If this is from one or a couple of wikis, you can turn these messages off in your preferences on those wikis until the problem has been solved. If not, you can report more about the problem in Phabricator.

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 dhjetor at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Files on Commons will have structured metadata in the future. The developers are now looking for examples of different kinds of metadata to make sure they are aware of them when they build prototypes for structured data on Commons. You can read more and help by giving examples of interesting media files.

The Structured Commons team are making sure Commons work with structured data. If you regularly contribute to Commons and Wikidata you can answer a survey that helps the team prioritise the tools that are important for the Commons and Wikidata communities. The survey ends on 22 December. You can read more on Commons. You can also help the team decide on better names for "captions" and "descriptions". This ends on 3 January 2018.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

On Wikidata, the "ruaje" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Kryej ndryshimet" to "Publiko ndryshimet". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [305][306]

Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [307]

Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [311]

With the new filters in the recent changes, "Përjashto të zgjedhurat" in "Hapësirat e emrit" did not work for "Filtrat e ruajtur" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [312]

The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [313]

Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [314]

Changes later this week

Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [315]

The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [316][317]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).

WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [318]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [319]

There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [320]

Problems

Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [321][322]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [323][324]

With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [327]

irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [328]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to. [330]

Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded. [332]

Problems

Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this. [333]

Changes later this week

When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users. [334]

When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like gallery widths="150px". You could use em or % instead of px but it would make no difference. You can now only use 150px or nothing (150). If you write something else, instead of treating it like px, it will not work. [335]

The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of Po or Jo it will say Thank and Cancel. It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public. [336]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [340][341][342]

You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [343]

The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like {{reflist}}, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [344]

The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [345]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [347][348]

You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [349]

Problems

Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [350]

Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like {{sfn}} are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [351][352]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [354]

Problems

Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [355][356]

Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [357]

Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [361]

The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [362][363]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [366][367]

Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [368]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now test global preferences and give feedback.

It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [375][376]

A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [377][378][379]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [383][384]

The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [385]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [387]

Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.

(I’m sorry for writing in English. Please help translate to your language)

If you’re regularly using Lua modules, creating and improving some of them, we need your feedback!

The Wikidata development team would like to provide more Lua functions, in order to improve the experience of people who write Lua scripts to reuse Wikidata's data on the Wikimedia projects. Our goals are to help harmonizing the existing modules across the Wikimedia projects, to make coding in Lua easier for the communities, and to improve the performance of the modules.

We would like to know more about your habits, your needs, and what could help you. We have a few questions for you on this page. Note that if you don’t feel comfortable with writing in English, you can answer in your preferred language.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.

The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools, please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.

Problems

MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version 1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week. [388][389][390]

The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [391]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).

User subpages ending in .json will now be protected from other people editing them, like .js and .css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage like User:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns. [392]

AbuseFilter will transition to use OOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks. [396][397]

In Special:Preferences, the preference "Rifreskoni listën mbikëqyrëse automatikisht sa herë një filtër ndryshohet (JavaScript e domosdoshme)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [398]

You can see names of individual abuse filters in Special:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed. [399]

You can now search through filter patterns at Special:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or a regular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted. [400]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you can give your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.

On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please follow T175706 to monitor progress of Tidy replacement. [401][402]

The sort order of categories will have errors for a short time starting Monday 9 April (UTC). We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a script to update the database. This will take between a few hours and a few days depending on wiki size. You can read more details. [405]

Tag filter titles will now work better on wikis where the tag filter title is in a language that is written in another direction than the language of that wiki. This could for example be an English title (written from left to right) on a Hebrew or an Arabic wiki (written from right to left). [406]

Problems

The bookmark icon for saved filters on the recent changes page disappeared because of new icon changes. This has now been fixed. [407]

For a week in March rollbacks got both the rollback and the undo tag on the recent changes page and other pages where you see tags. This has now been fixed. [408]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 April. It will be on all wikis from 12 April (calendar).

Patrolled edits now have three states instead of two. Recent changes filters are updated to show unpatrolled, autopatrolled and manually patrolled edits. [409]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [410]

Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [411][412]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki. PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function. [413]

The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step. [416]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

<mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of flagged revisions will not get this feature in May. [417]

The rollback function could change. This was a German community request. All editors with rollback rights can leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).

We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process on Phabricator. [419]

When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date. [421]

You can soon turn on the Performance Inspector in the Redaktimi section in your preferences. It shows information about the performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly. [422]

There is a new abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [423][424][425]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones. [426]

Problems

The abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed. [427]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [429][430]

You may have heard that the Foundation’s Collaboration Team has been working on a project to improve maps. We’re planning to release the mapframe feature, which embeds maps in wiki pages, to most Wikipedias. I’m writing this note to clarify that nine Wikipedias are not scheduled to get mapframe as part of the release, including this Wikipedia. The reason is Flagged Revisions.

The nine Wikipedias that are not getting mapframe at this time are wikis that use the strict version of Flagged Revisions. At these wikis the latest changes to a page are not shown by default until they can be approved. This protocol causes problems with mapframe. When an approved version of a mapframe map exists on the page and someone edits the map, the approved page displays a blank frame where the map should be.

We’ve looked into the issue (T151665) and may have a solution (T192695). It’s not simple. At this time we can’t promise that we’ll be able to fix the incompatibility of Flagged Revisions and mapframe as part of our current maps project. The current maps project has specific goals and a limited time-frame. We will keep an eye on the task, though, and if we can find time, it’s something we’d like to take care of. If you have thoughts or ideas about this, please leave them on the project talk page or in the tasks I’ve linked to.

The new Advanced Search interface is now available as a Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated. [431]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can give feedback and suggestions.

The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it. Read more on mediawiki.org[432]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week. [433][434]

It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked. [435]

Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script. [437]

There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this. [438]

Problems

Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations. [439]

A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them. [441]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (calendar).

Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [442]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles. [443]

A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development. [444]

Some wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July. [445][446]

Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [450]

Problems

You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.

MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [451]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Sorry to use English. Please help translate to your language! Thank you.

In short: starting on June 18, New Filters for Edit Review (now in Beta) will become standard on Watchlists. They provide an array of new tools and an improved interface. If you prefer the current page you will be able to opt out. Learn more about the New Filters.

Over 70,000 people have activated the New Filters beta, which has been in testing on Watchlist for more than eight months. We feel confident that the features are stable and effective, but if you have thoughts about these tools or the beta graduation, please let us know on the project talk page. In particular, tell us if you know of a special incompatibility or other issue that makes the New Filters problematic on your wiki. We’ll examine the blocker and may delay release on your wiki until the issue can be addressed.

The deployment will start on June 18 or on June 25, depending on the wiki (check the list). After the deployment, you will also be able to opt-out this change directly from the Watchlist page and also in your preferences.

How to be ready?

Please share this announcement!

If you use local Gadgets that change things on your Watchlist pages, or have a customized scripts or CSS, be ready. You may have to make some changes to your configuration. Despite the fact that we have tried to take most cases into consideration, some configurations may break. The Beta phase is a great opportunity to have a look at local scripts and gadgets: some of them may be replaced by native features from the Beta feature.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [454]

There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [455]

Problems

The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [456]

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Please help translate to your language
Hi everyone. The Readers web team has recently begun working on exposing issue templates on the mobile website. Currently, details about issues with page content are generally hidden on the mobile website. This leaves readers unaware of the reliability of the pages they are reading. The goal of this project is to improve awareness of particular issues within an article on the mobile web. We will do this by changing the visual styling of page issues.

Our next step would be to start implementing these changes. We wanted to reach out to you for any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions you might have before beginning development. Please visit the project page where we have more information and mockups of how this may look. Please leave feedback on the talk page.

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [460][461]

The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [462][463]

When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [465][466]

Changes later this week

Content translation users who translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles. [467]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 June. It will be on all wikis from 28 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

The database for tags will be changed. This will happen on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge. [468]

Problems

Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem. [469]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

I'm preparing a change in who can edit sitewide CSS/JS pages. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Vector.js which are executed in the browser of all readers and editors.) Currently all administrators are able to edit these pages, which poses a serious and unnecessary security risk. Soon, a dedicated, smaller user group will take over this task. Your community will be able to decide who belongs in this group, so this should mean very little change for you. You can find out more and provide feedback at the consultation page on Meta. If you are involved in maintaining CSS/JS code, or policymaking around adminship requests, please give it a look!

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

WebM video files have smaller file size but still be of the same quality. Creating WebM files will take longer time. [470]

The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This was supposed to already have happened but was delayed. For most wikis this will happen on 9 July. For the rest it will happen on 16 July. [471]

When you rolled back an edit it could get both the Rollback and Undo tags. This has been fixed. [473]

Rollbacks from autopatrolled users were not marked as patrolled. This has been fixed. [474]

Changes later this week

When you edit a link in the visual editor there will be two separate buttons to change which page the link goes to (target) or its text (label). [475][476]

On the mobile version you can find a link to an editor's contributions from their user page. Now this will work even if they haven't created a user page. [477]

When you edit a discussion on the mobile version you sometimes get your signature automatically added. This will now not happen if you have already added a signature manually. This is to avoid double signatures. [478]

When you look at Wikimedia code in Gerrit there will be a new interface. It is on by default for new users. This is also true for developers. This is to make it easier to understand what is happening. [480]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 July. It will be on all wikis from 12 July (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Today all administrators can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. There will be a new user group for editing CSS and JavaScript. Administrators will no longer automatically be able to do this. This is because it is a security risk when all administrator accounts can edit JavaScript even if they never plan to or do not know how it works. You can read more. [481]

You can now see a new log of pages being created at Special:Log/create. It includes pages which are later deleted. It is now available on all Wikimedia wikis except Commons and Wikidata. [484]

You can see how many pageviews a wiki had from specific countries. The Wikistats2 maps have now been updated. [485]

Changes later this week

Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days instead of three. If you have already set a length preference it will not change. [486]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on July 17 at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on July 18 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article. For example that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You can read more and leave feedback.

You can use <inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages. For example to search the archives of a community discussion page. Instead of prefix:Page name you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You can read more and leave feedback.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

When you log in to your account you can choose to keep being logged in. This checkbox now works better than before on the mobile version for users without JavaScript. [487]

Wikis that use Citoid can automatically generate citations for Swedish news sites. This only works in the visual editor. This now works for Swedish public service radio. More will come. Others could use this to add news sites in other languages in the future. [488]

Editors can do max 90 edits per minute. This is new since last month. This does not affect bots or administrators. [489]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 korrik. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 korrik. It will be on all wikis from 26 korrik (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 korrik at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 korrik. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 gusht. It will be on all wikis from 2 gusht (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 korrik at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

The MediaWiki version that was released two weeks ago was late to some Wikimedia wikis. This was because of bugs. It was on all wikis 30 July. [496][497]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 August. It will be on all wikis from 9 August.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 August at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

The team working on TemplateStyles at the Wikimedia Foundation would like to enable TemplateStyles on this wiki.

TemplateStyles is a feature to allow non-administrators to write and manage CSS styles for templates. It allows contributors who edit templates to separate content and presentation. A good web practice that makes it easier to manage the layout of templates. If you don't edit templates, this will not have any impact on your contributions.

TemplateStyles is useful for a few reasons.

It makes it possible for templates to work better on mobile.

It cuts out confusion on where to apply CSS rules.

Editing CSS is currently limited to administrators, which is a major barrier to participation.

All stylesheets must be loaded on all pages (whether they actually use the page or not), which wastes bandwidth and makes debugging style rules more difficult.

This is an optional feature and no one must use it, but template contributors are encouraged to do so! Please discuss and let us know if there are any concerns. If there are no concerns we will proceed to deploy the feature on the 9th of August.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

CSS in templates can now be stored in a separate page on all wikis. This is called TemplateStyles. This is to make it easier to edit how templates look. [498]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 August at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The developers are planning more ways to block users. This could be blocking someone from just a page or a namespace. You can read more. You can leave feedback on the talk page. [499]